He found himself almost wishing he could remember one of the old hoodoo ladies’ spells to placate the spirits of the place.
“All clear,” he said. “If you don’t mind bats, that is. Heard ’em roostin’ upstairs.”
* * *
The hacienda’s stable, flanking the casa near the bunkhouse, was still sound enough, so Prophet’s party housed their horses in the low-slung adobe structure, rubbing them down, watering them, and giving them each a small portion of oats.
The horses were all stalwart and broad-bottomed, accustomed to extreme climates and severe situations, so they’d be able to make do with smaller rations for a short time with few ill effects. Mean might be a little meaner, Prophet thought, but maybe he’d show a little more appreciation for his next bale of green timothy.
Despite the animal scat and spiders inside the casa, they threw their gear down in front of the fireplace in the old great room, which combined the parlor area and kitchen. There was a pile of mesquite and juniper beside the hearth, obviously left by recent visitors.
While Prophet wasn’t sure he could trust that the chimney was clear, it was big enough that he decided to risk laying a fire in the wagon-sized, fieldstone hearth. He was pleased to see that very little smoke issued into the room, the bulk of it curling up the chimney. He could hear some bats scurrying out, squealing, when the first tendrils of smoke hit them.
Prophet plucked a burning brand from the fire and used it to light a quirley, then walked around outside, wanting to get a good sense of the layout here before darkness descended.
He and the others might have to defend it, after all, and a place could look a whole lot different once the sun went down. Not only did they have to worry about the dwarf’s men but other banditos. And last he’d heard, there was still a band or two of Kiowa giving this stretch of western Texas occasional fits. Given the vastness of the area, there were damn few cavalrymen and Texas Rangers to go around.
As the sun sank behind western ridges, long shadows puddled in the hacienda’s yard, and the intense heat lost some of its edge, Prophet and Colter headed off to find meat for supper. There wasn’t much game around, though they flushed a couple of armadillos out of a thorny wash. Prophet had eaten armadillo down in Mexico, but he hadn’t much cared for it, so he was glad when he and Colter each managed to bring down a jackrabbit apiece.
They’d quickly field dressed the animals and started to carry them back toward the lodge when Prophet said out of the side of his mouth, “Stop and bend down to brush something off your pants cuff, will you, Red?”
Colter glanced at him, frowning, but he’d been out in the high-and-rocky long enough to realize the bounty hunter’s intention.
Colter bent forward and swatted at his left pants leg, down around his boot, as though to remove ocotillo thorns. Prophet took a step beyond Colter and then turned toward the kid, looking down to watch what the redhead was doing. But instead of watching Colter, Prophet quickly scanned the desert flanking them, picking out a shadow sliding back behind an escarpment about fifty, maybe sixty yards away.
“All right, them thorns are gone,” Prophet said in an almost whimsical tone.
Colter straightened, and they continued walking toward the casa whose cracked adobe walls and red stone tiles fairly glowed in the fast-fading light, under a sky of periwinkle blue.
“What was that about, Lou?” Colter asked, keeping his voice low.
“Seen somethin’. Not sure what. Maybe one of Moon’s men skulkin’ around.”
Colter started to turn his head.
“Keep lookin’ forward, Red. I may not have a third eye in the back of my big, ugly noggin, but I got a sixth sense, and it’s tellin’ me our shadower hasn’t moved again since I first seen him. Once we get back to the hacienda, you go in and tell the ladies to keep their eyes open. I’m gonna circle around and come at the escarpment from the other side, see who or what’s out there.”
“Want me to come?”
“Nah, I make enough noise, cast a large enough shadow for two men the way it is.”
Strolling casually, they entered the casa by one of the rear doorways, the door itself having long since disappeared. Prophet handed his rabbit to Colter and then stole out through the same door by which they’d all entered the place.
He removed his spurs, set them atop the adobe wall, then made sure his Winchester was loaded. The shotgun swinging barrel up behind his back, he tramped off to the north of the villa, weaving through spindly shrubs, cacti, and boulders. He walked about a quarter mile east and then slowly made his way south until he was in the same general area in which he and Colter had shot their supper.
There was more shadow than light on the ground now, so he felt he was able to move with less chance of being seen. As he moved toward the escarpment behind which he’d seen the shadow slide, he scoured the terrain around him and the ground before him. As he stepped between two catclaw shrubs, he stopped and dropped to a knee.
With the index finger of his gloved right hand, he traced the indentation in the ground before him.
It was a very faint boot print.
26
THE BOOT THAT had made the print was maybe size ten with a round toe. The sand here wasn’t very soft, as there was no moisture to speak of, so Prophet couldn’t gather much beyond that the track was fresh. Probably not more than an hour old, if that.
With all the wind around here, a print that faint would disappear quickly.
Even more slowly and purposefully, Prophet made his way to the escarpment, coming at it from its northeastern flank. The man was gone. But two relatively clear boot prints remained. He’d been standing right where Prophet had thought, sort of shouldered up against the scarp where, looking around the north side, he could have kept an eye on Prophet and Colter.
Prophet looked all around the scarp, the hair under his collar prickling. He saw no one. The only sound was the breeze brushing the escarpment, scratching shrub branches together, and the cooing of a faraway dove.
Nothing moved.
There was no longer enough light to be able to track the hombre from the scarp. Prophet would give it another try come morning. Until then he and the others would have to keep a night watch.
Since there appeared to have been only one man out here, he was likely just some lone pilgrim scouting the hacienda to see if it was vacant. Maybe some harmless old desert rat and saddle tramp looking to throw down in the same old ruin he’d camped in before.
But Prophet hadn’t come to his thirty-odd years taking foolish chances. He knew Ole Scratch was waiting for him to start shoveling coal, but he’d just as soon keep his boots planted on this side of the sod for as long as possible. He didn’t much care for the smell of butane, anyway, and he’d heard that Ole Fork-tail wasn’t much of a talker. . . .
He went back to the hacienda and told the others about the lone set of boot prints. Louisa’s only response was to drag her gun oil out and start taking apart and cleaning her pistols and Winchester. After they’d roasted and eaten the rabbits with hot coffee, though Prophet could have done with a couple shots of tequila . . . in a cool adobe cantina, say . . . and Louisa had rewrapped Ruth’s bullet-torn arm, Prophet took the first night watch.
It was good dark, and an owl was hooting. Prophet could see the flickering, black shadows of bats darting about—probably the long-nosed and ghost-faced bats native to the area. Coyotes yodeled in the distant ridges.
He walked out to a thicket of spindly mesquites and sat against a rock amongst them. He was out there about an hour, his keen senses finely tuned, watching the stars slowly pinwheel in the velvet sky, when he heard footsteps behind him.
“Name yourself,” he said.
“Lola Montez.”
“Ain’t that a snort,” Prophet said, watching Louisa approach on his right, her rifle on her shoulder.
Senorita Mont
ez was his favorite opera house entertainer, though he knew he wasn’t alone in fantasizing about the exquisite beauty from afar despite her “evil eye.” It was said that the raving Spanish beauty’s many lovers had dropped like flies from suicide, duels, and consumptive exhaustion. She’d even caused some mucky-muck royal across the ocean to renounce his throne.
Imagine renouncing your throne for a woman!
Louisa stood about six feet to Prophet’s right, staring toward the east where stars flickered over the black wall of a steep mountain. Usually when she was silent for that long, something was on her mind.
She’d get to it when she was good and ready, though it always made him a little uneasy, wondering what in hell it was this time.
It was a humdinger.
“Lou, you don’t love me anymore, do you?”
“Ah hell.”
“I guess that’s answer enough.” She turned her head to stare down at him, her rifle on her shoulder, the light, fresh breeze nudging her blond hair back. “I don’t blame you, Lou.”
“Louisa, goddamnit, what happened to you down in Mexico?”
She sighed. They hadn’t talked about this before except in a roundabout way, but now they had the calf down and the iron hot. It was probably as much of a relief for her as it was for him.
“What part of it—Sugar or . . . my turning . . . ?”
He knew she’d had a dalliance of sorts with the blind pistolero, Sugar Delphi, and that had rankled him, to be sure. He was only a human male. But what had really twisted his tail was her changing sides—riding with Sugar’s bunch of killers and bank robbers whom Prophet and Louisa had chased across the Mojave desert in western Sonora and had ended up holing up with in San Gezo, to join forces against a rampaging band of Mojave Apaches.
“Your becoming one of them,” Prophet said. “Don’t you know I’ll never be able to trust you again after you pulled a stunt like that? Hell, I should have shot you!”
Now she was rankled, too. She turned full around to him, balled her free hand into a tight fist at her side. “You should have tried!”
Before Prophet realized what he was doing, he scissored his left leg sharply, rammed it into the side of her right foot, kicking both her feet out from under her. She gave a squeal as she smacked the ground on her rump.
Her hair flew. She dropped her rifle, and her hat rolled off her shoulder.
The sudden violence shocked her. She glared at him, gritted her teeth, and then threw herself at him. He grabbed her by the front of her striped serape, pulled her across his chest, and rolled on top of her. He held both her arms down on the ground and used his body to pin the rest of her, though he could feel her muscles expanding and contracting beneath him as she struggled.
Prophet had lost his hat, and a wing of hair hung down over one eye.
He glared down at her. She glared back at him.
But then she blinked.
Prophet had no idea what he was going to do next until he’d pressed his mouth hard against hers, ground his lips against hers. She instantly stopped struggling. He released her arms, and she wrapped them around his neck, returning his kiss hungrily, groaning and wrapping her legs around him, clinging to him desperately as they kissed.
He could feel her breasts swell under the serape and her calico blouse.
He felt himself come alive.
With both hands, she pushed her face away from his. Her eyes were bright as lights in the darkness. Her chest heaved beneath him. Breathily, pleadingly, she said, “Lou!”
She was like the strongest top-shelf liquor he’d ever drunk. His blood was flooded with her, with the need to couple with her. It frightened him a little, but tempering the fear was his raging desire. He rolled off of her, lifted her poncho up over her head, and tossed it away. She immediately started unbuttoning her blouse.
Prophet rose. She sort of groaned, lifting her chin, watching him, her desire bright in her eyes.
“I’ll be right back.”
He picked up his Winchester, moved away from the rocks and mesquites. He stood listening, was damn glad when he heard nothing but the yodeling coyotes beneath the thudding of his heart in his ears. Returning to her, he leaned his rifle against a boulder, lifted his shotgun’s lanyard up over his head, and rested the barn blaster against the boulder.
Louisa was out of her blouse. Her firm, pale breasts jostling, she kicked off her boots and then pulled off her socks, and wriggled out of her pants. Prophet was a fool for doing what he was about to do out here when he should be keeping watch, but there was no stopping either of them now.
Not when the wildfire had been smoldering for this long.
He peeled off his longhandles. Louisa leaned back on her elbows and spread her knees.
Prophet dropped to his knees before her. He could hear her breathing beneath his own fervent rasps. He leaned forward. She lifted her head to meet him, and they mashed their mouths together once again as he entered her.
Her mouth was ripe, wet, and soft.
Her breasts mashed against his chest, distended nipples raking him thrillingly. He bucked against her, and she lay back, lifting her own hips to meet his in their old, practiced love dance. They didn’t make much noise, not like they wanted to, and to keep from groaning aloud Louisa pressed her mouth against his shoulder. His feeling the sharpness of her teeth added to the excitement of their love tangle.
Prophet grunted quietly, thrusting . . . thrusting. . . .
“Lou?” she said, her voice quaking with the passionate violence of their coupling.
He made an unintelligible sound, half growl, half wail.
“I’m bad medicine.”
“Uh-uh.” He grunted, toiling over her, Louisa thrusting her groin up hard against his.
“Yes . . .” She swallowed, tugged at his ears with her hands, glanced down between them as she rose and fell beneath him. Her hair slid back and forth across her shoulder. “I’m evil. Deep . . . inside me, there’s a bad rot, and . . . it . . . came out . . . in Mexico . . . !”
“Shut the hell up, girl.”
“You’ve known . . . all along . . . haven’t you?”
Louisa squeezed her eyes closed, dropped her jaw in a soundless scream. She lay back in the sand, quivering, grinding her heels into his back. As Prophet spent himself, she turned her head to one side and bit down on her knuckles to keep from screaming.
He rolled off of her, sucking the cool, dry air into his lungs, catching his breath. “Louisa,” he gasped, “you ain’t bad medicine. Confused, yeah. After what you been through, hell. . . .”
“Lou?”
“What is it?”
She was sitting up on his left, knees bent, propped on her hands and staring straight out before them. She lifted her right hand and pointed. “Look.”
Prophet looked off to the south and slightly right. A faint umber glow limned the ridgeline of a distant hill, silhouetting the hill against it. Prophet sat up straighter, staring.
“Fire.”
Louisa glanced at him. “Campfire, you think? Or wildfire?”
Prophet continued to stare at the faintly pulsating umber glow and shook his head. A wildfire out here, and that close, could very well be deadly, as most wildfires were in the west where there was plenty of dry fuel to keep them burning.
“If that’s a campfire, it’s a damn big one,” Prophet said. “And it might just belong to the hombre whose tracks I picked up earlier.” He rose stiffly and brushed sand and grit off his butt and his knees. “Best check it out.”
He stumbled around, wincing at the sand chewing at his tender feet, dressing. When he’d donned his hat and was tucking his shirttails into his denims, he heard footsteps coming up behind him. He turned and was about to reach for one of his weapons when he saw Colter walk around the far side of the rocks and mesquites—a slender, long-haired silhouette
in the darkness.
“Lou?”
Prophet glanced at Louisa, who had sat down to pull her boots on, and felt a flush of embarrassment rise in his ears. “Yeah.”
“You see that?”
Colter was looking toward the dark orange glow in the sky.
“Yeah. We’re gonna check it out.” Prophet buttoned his fly, ears growing even warmer with chagrin, and then looped his shotgun over his head and shoulder, sliding it behind him. “You’d best stay here, keep an eye on Ruth.”
“You got it.”
When Louisa had wrapped her pistols around her hips, Prophet grabbed his Winchester, and, adjusting his Colt tied low on his right thigh, he began walking south, toward the glow. Louisa came up from behind him.
“You think he saw?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“I don’t know. You think he did?”
“How would I know?”
Prophet cursed their foolishness and shook his head, lengthening his stride, picking out obstacles in his way, as he and Louisa made their way to the distant hill.
Damn stupid, them carrying on that way. Sometimes he wondered how in hell he’d kept his boots planted on the green side of the sod as long as he had, cork-headed fool that he was.
They rose up and over one low hill and then crossed a shallow wash, bats winging through the air about ten feet above their heads, making whirling sounds, like slow bullets. Only one coyote was yammering now, somewhere off to Prophet’s left.
They walked another half a mile across the rocky desert, meandering around cacti, and then started climbing the steep rocky hill behind which the light appeared to be emanating. When they’d come within about sixty yards of the ridge crest, Prophet started to hear voices rising from the hill’s other side.
That slowed both his and Louisa’s pace some, knowing that other folks were around.
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